Umberto Albarella

Umberto Albarella is an Italian-British archaeologist and activist. He is Professor of Zooarchaeology at the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield.

Education

Albarella graduated from the University of Naples with a degree in natural sciences. He developed an interest in anthropology and archaeology while an undergraduate in 1982. In 2004, he received a PhD from the University of Durham, supervised by Peter Rowley-Conwy.

Career

Between 1993 and 1995 Albarella worked at the London branch of English Heritage. He was an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham from 1995 to 2000, and Durham University from 2000 to 2004. In 2004, Albarella joined the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield as a research officer to expand and develop the zooarchaeology lab.

In 2007, Albarella published Pigs and humans: 10,000 years of interaction, which was the first major attempt at synthesising archaeological studies of pigs. The 2011 volume, EthnoZooArchaeology: The Past and Present of Human-Animal Relationships, was described as "important collection of papers for both ethnoarchaeologists and zooarchaeologists". He co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology, published in 2017.

Albarella has served on the editorial boards of the journals Anthropozoologica, Environmental Archaeology and Medieval Archaeology. In 2002, he was elected onto the International Committee of ICAZ, and served as General Secretary of ICAZ from 2006 to 2012.

Albarella is a member of the ICAZ Committee of Honor, recognising individuals who have made a major contribution to archaeozoology.

Selected publications

References